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Child 44

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The Farm

The new international bestseller from the author of phenomenal Child 44 trilogy... The Farm. If you refuse to believe me, I will no longer consider you my son. Daniel believed that his parents were enjoying a peaceful retirement on a remote farm in Sweden. But with a single phone call, everything changes. Your mother...she's not well, his father tells him. She's been imagining things - terrible, terrible things. She's had a psychotic breakdown, and been committed to a mental hospital. Before Daniel can board a plane to Sweden, his mother calls: Everything that man has told you is a lie. I'm not mad... I need the police... Meet me at Heathrow. Caught between his parents, and unsure of who to believe or trust, Daniel becomes his mother's unwilling judge and jury as she tells him an urgent tale of secrets, of lies, of a crime and a conspiracy that implicates his own father.

The Alphabet House

British pilots James Teasdale and Bryan Young have been chosen to conduct a special photo-reconnaissance mission near Dresden, Germany. Intelligence believes the Nazis are building new factories that could turn the tide of the war. When their plane is shot down, James and Bryan know they will be executed if captured. With an enemy patrol in pursuit, they manage to jump aboard a train reserved for senior SS soldiers wounded on the eastern front.

The One Man: A Novel

It's 1944. Physics professor Alfred Mendel and his family are trying to flee Paris when they are caught and forced onto a train along with thousands of other Jewish families. At the other end of the long, torturous train ride, Alfred is separated from his family and sent to the men's camp, where all of his belongings are tossed on a roaring fire. His books, his papers, his life's work. The Nazis have no idea what they have just destroyed. And without that physical record, Alfred is one of only two people in the world with his particular knowledge.

Eye of the Red Tsar: A Novel of Suspense

Shortly after midnight on July 17, 1918, the imprisoned family of Tsar Nicholas Romanov was awakened and led down to the basement of the Ipatiev house. There they were summarily executed. A decade later, one man lives in purgatory, banished to a forest on the outskirts of humanity. Pekkala was once the most trusted secret agent of the Romanovs, the right-hand man of the Tsar himself. Now he is Prisoner 4745-P. But the state needs Pekkala one last time.

The Wrong Side of Goodbye: A Harry Bosch Novel, Book 21

Harry Bosch is California's newest private investigator. He doesn't advertise, he doesn't have an office, and he's picky about who he works for, but it doesn't matter. His chops from 30 years with the LAPD speak for themselves. Soon one of Southern California's biggest moguls comes calling. The reclusive billionaire has less than six months to live and a lifetime of regrets. He hires Bosch to find out whether he has an heir.

The Cuckoo's Calling

After losing his leg to a land mine in Afghanistan, Cormoran Strike is barely scraping by as a private investigator. Then John Bristow walks through his door with an amazing story: his sister, the legendary supermodel Lula Landry, famously fell to her death a few months earlier. The police ruled it a suicide, but John refuses to believe that. The case plunges Strike into the world of multimillionaire beauties, rock-star boyfriends, and desperate designers, and it introduces him to every variety of pleasure, enticement, seduction, and delusion known to man.

Orphan X

Evan Smoak is a man with skills, resources, and a personal mission to help those with nowhere else to turn. He's also a man with a dangerous past. Chosen as a child, he was raised and trained as part of the off-the-books black box Orphan program, designed to create the perfect deniable intelligence assets - i.e. assassins. He was Orphan X. Evan broke with the program, using everything he learned to disappear.

The Cold, Cold Ground

Adrian McKinty was born in Carrickfergus, Northern Ireland. He studied politics and philosophy at Oxford before moving to America in the early 1990s. Living first in Harlem, he found employment as a construction worker, barman, and bookstore clerk. In 2000 he moved to Denver to become a high school English teacher and it was there that he began writing fiction.

The Trespasser: A Novel

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The Life We Bury

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On a foggy summer night, 11 people - 10 privileged, one down-on-his-luck painter - depart Martha's Vineyard on a private jet headed for New York. Sixteen minutes later the unthinkable happens: The plane plunges into the ocean. The only survivors are Scott Burroughs - the painter - and a four-year-old boy who is now the last remaining member of an immensely wealthy and powerful media mogul's family.

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The Short Drop

A decade ago, fourteen-year-old Suzanne Lombard, the daughter of Benjamin Lombard - then a senator, now a powerful vice president running for the presidency - disappeared in the most sensational missing-person case in the nation's history. Still unsolved, the mystery remains a national obsession. For legendary hacker and marine Gibson Vaughn, the case is personal - Suzanne Lombard had been like a sister to him.

Palace of Treason: A Novel

Captain Dominika Egorova of the Russian Intelligence Service (SVR) has returned from the West to Moscow and the Center, the headquarters of her service. She finds things worse than when she left. She despises the men she must serve, the oligarchs and crooks and thugs of Putin's Russia. What no one knows is that Dominika is working for the CIA as Washington's most sensitive penetration of SVR and the Kremlin.

The Power of the Dog

This explosive novel of the drug trade takes you deep inside a world riddled with corruption, betrayal, and bloody revenge. From the streets of New York City to Mexico City and Tijuana to the jungles of Central America, this is the war on drugs like you've never seen it.

Fool Me Once

Former special ops pilot Maya, home from the war, sees an unthinkable image captured by her nanny cam while she is at work: her two-year-old daughter playing with Maya's husband, Joe - who had been brutally murdered two weeks earlier. The provocative question at the heart of the mystery: Can you believe everything you see with your own eyes, even when you desperately want to?

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Birdman showcases Hayder at her spine-tingling best as beloved series character Jack Caffery tracks down a terrifying serial killer. In his first case as lead investigator with London's crack murder squad, Detective Jack Caffery is called on to investigate the murder of a young woman whose body has been discovered near the Millennium Dome in Greenwich, southeast London.

The Day of the Jackal

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A Great Reckoning: A Novel

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Publisher's Summary

It is 1956. Three years ago, Leo Demidov moved on from his career as a member of the state security force. As an MGB officer, Leo had been responsible for untold numbers of arrests and interrogations. But as a reward for his heroic service in stopping a killer who had terrorized citizens throughout the country, Leo was granted the authority to establish and run a homicide department in Moscow.

Now, he strives to see justice done on behalf of murder victims in the Soviet capital, while at the same time working to build a life with his wife Raisa and their adopted daughters, Zoya and Elena.

Leo's past, however, can not be left behind so easily, and the legacy of his former career - the friends and families of those he had arrested as a state security officer - continues to hound him. Now, a new string of murders in the capital threaten to bring Leo's past crashing into the present, shattering the fragile foundations of his new life in Moscow, and putting his daughter Zoya's life at risk.

Faced with a threat to his family, Leo is launched on a desperate, personal mission that will take him to the harsh Siberian Gulags, to the depths of the hidden criminal underworld, and into the heart of Budapest and the Hungarian uprising.

Wonderful to return to the characters and the world created in Smith's first novel, Child 44, which really rocked me. Not quite as strong as the first work, but still a terrific read. Hope he continues to develop this into a full character series - I'd jump on the next one, if there is one.

The author did his research and tied this work of fiction relatively well into historically significant events, like Kruschev's "Secret Speech" of 1956 and into the Hungarian Revolution of the same year. I didn't know about these historical events until I listened to the book, and did a bit of research afterwards. I feel both entertained and feel like I learned something - I am left impressed with this piece of historical fiction.

I was not as enamored with this effort by Tom Rob Smith as I was with his Child 44. No matter what trauma beset Leo, he had an amazing resilience. The motivations of several characters in the book were not believable. I got the feeling that the story could have ended at any time and there would have not been much less resolution as there was when the book actually did end. If you haven't listened to anything by Smith and want to give one of his books a try, go with Child 44. And then try another author.

I didn't quite feel this one as much as I did Child 44. The stakes weren't quite as high and it dragged a bit in the middle. But it was good to spend more time with Leo. But I enjoyed the book both as a thrill ride and as a look at the immediate post Stalin Russia. But I hope Smith's next novel has a case that feels more urgent.

As many declared that this story is not as brilliant as Child 44, but it is a very good one.

75% of the novel will keep you in the edge with heart beating events, but at the end of the book the pace become slower and it become more like an insight about history (so if you like reading history this is an extra bonus for you).

The narrator is very good. No major complaints, I just couldn't get in the mood with him 100%, but I blame myself here, it seems I am not so fond of the Russian accent. Listen to the sample.

I absolutely loved Child 44 and was really looking forward to something similar to come after it. That being said this book was again very well written and very interesting, but not quite what I’d expected. It was a little slower and a little harder to get into but once the real story came out it sucked you in just like Child 44. Following Leo and his family into a life that you would never imagine for them, the twist and turns, the love and hate really kept it going. Now time for the final book.

The Secret Speech is the second book in the Leo Demidov trilogy, and I dove into it promptly after finishing Child 44. Unfortunately, I found this book lacking in the qualities that made the first book so extraordinary.

Instead of the intimate, personal tone of Child 44, The Secret Speech instead opts for a more impersonal story of a country at war. Perhaps if this was a standalone book, the plotline of a nation at a moment of internal change and the politics involved would have been more engaging. As it was, however, it was difficult to make the shift to a novel far less character driven than the first book had been.

Another challenging aspect for me was the plot’s focus on Leo and Raisa’s adopted daughter, Zoya. While we met Zoya in the first book, little time was spent on her character; and I had a hard time now suddenly caring about her as much as the story demanded. Perhaps this was a personal issue or failure that other readers won’t experience - I don’t know. For me, at least, the sudden jump to Zoya’s plotline was a difficult one, and I was unsuccessful in my attempt to find her at all sympathetic. This proved especially difficult because some of her decisions were so unlikeable I was unable to forgive them, even when taking into consideration her extremely traumatic childhood.

This book attempted a far greater reach than the first book; spanning more time, more locations, more history. Much time is spent on the war, with battle scenes of tanks, masses of protesters, bombs, and the internal manipulations of the top players. Again, perhaps as an independent story it could have worked, but as a follow-up to Child 44 I found it a great loss to not focus on the people and relationships that made the first novel such a triumph.

I’m not sorry I read the book, and for those that loved Child 44 and want to complete the trilogy, I suppose it’s worth reading. Just be prepared for a much broader plot with far less intimacy or character development.

This book opens with an interesting and believable premise, but quickly turns into a parody of a James Bond movie. Over and over, ridiculous action sequences are inserted that have no bearing on the story, and in some cases they're so sketchy that they had me laughing at loud.

The villains behave in entirely unbelievable ways, and I found myself correctly guessing some of the twists near the end, not because of clues the author had provided, but because the twists were the most ridiculous coincidences I could imagine.

If Tom Rob Smith writes another thriller set in the dismal post-war USSR, with hopeless characters and maddening bureaucracies, I will devour it like I did Child 44 and the follow-up, The Secret Speech. I'm not a fan of "series" thrillers, but I find Smith's work to be extremely compelling. His character, Leo is an unlikely, yet wholly likable hero.